Here's Paddy Get Back. The version in Doerflinger has more couplets but starts with the same one. I'll check the tune tomorrow. It's too late to check now, but could the extra things in the 1938 hard copy be just the things that came from Maitland? Needs a more detailed look to check. 38 and 64 have different tunes for Dom Pedro (38 The Sailors' Alphabet chorus one, 64 Derry Down). I haven't got 24, but I see there's a copy for sale on Amazon UK; I might be tempted! Mick
PADDY GET BACK I was broke out of a job in the city of London, I went down to Shadwell docks to get a ship. 'Twas in the middle of the cold month of November; And I thought 'twas time to make another trip. Chorus: Paddy, get back, take in the slack! Heave around the capstan, heave a pawl, Heave a pawl! 'Bout ship and stations and be handy, Rise tacks and sheets and mains'l haul! There was a Yankee ship a-lying in the Basin; She was bound for New York, the boarding-master said. If I ever lay hands upon that boarding-master [It will be a month before he leaves his bed.] The pilot left the ship way down the Channel, And the captain said we was bound around the Horn. [He said that if we did not do our duty He would make us wish we never had been born.] The mate and second mate belonged to Boston, The old man hailed from Bangor down in Maine. The three of them was rough-and-tumble fighters, [The treatment that we got, it was a shame.] We were called on deck one night to reef the topsails; Belaying pins was a-flying about the deck. The mate he got ahold of me by the collar: "If you don't sing a song I'll break your neck." Source: Joanna Colcord, Songs of American Sailormen, 1938 The notes are: A late-comer among shanties was "Paddy Get Back." Words and air both suggest that it was not one of the "reg'lar oldtimers"; it must have begun life, perhaps as late as the 'seventies or 'eighties, as a forecastle song with a music-hall origin, and have been adapted to capstan use in the last days of sail. I believe that it appears in no other collection, and I have heard it sung only a few times. It is evident that the song must originally have consisted of quatrains, with second and fourth lines rhyming; but I have been able to collect only scattered and unrhymed couplets. I have taken the liberty with this song of piecing them together, writing a line here and there, to develop the "pattern" which seems to be indicated. In the version which follows, the interpolated lines are enclosed in brackets. There must have been endless additional verses describing the sailors' treatment on a "hard case" ship. The air is that used by Captain Richard Maitland.
|